Patchwork Powersuit
This modular garment was designed and crafted at the Berlin-based Queer Needlework Circle, for our manifestation ‘Powersuits’. We each created outfits that enhance our most embodied, empowered selves, drawing inspiration from historic queer semiotics.
I created a patchwork of gendered textiles, including sports jersey’s, bandanas (in homage to both cowboys and the hanky code), and an old lace tablecloth. Collage is alchemy; it is the rearranging of matter to form a new substance. This patchwork is an identity collage, an experiment in gender alchemy. In the process of deconstructing its components, I did a ritual sacrifice of an NFL (Steelers) jersey before rending it to quilt squares. The semiotic cultural script of American football is heavy in my personal history, and to transform this artifact of toxic masculinity felt both cathartic and mischievious.
The pattern I developed, including hood, sleeve, and assless chaps, is modular and can be worn in different combinations. As a trans-bodied person, revealing the naked torso is an unabashed celebration of the parts that society pretends not to see. It offers literal transparency of a body beyond gender.
Photos taken by Madelyn Byrd, February 2024.
Featured in the documentary FA-SCHÖN by Theoroorus Johannes Adriaans
“A very important aspect of our weekly meetings – and the Berlin group still meets every Wednesday 19.30h at Village.Berlin if you wish to join us – is the moment in which we show and tell. Participants show what they are working on and share with the group what is important to them. People exchange and often ask eachother for help, and therefore we share the skills that are available in the group.
The complete documentary film (24:35 mins) shows an array of community members who together have worked on their own and each others power suits, resulting in a story about queer life in light of empowerment, gender euphoria, peculiarity and curiosity.”
— Theodoorus Johannes Adrians
Featured in “Excavating Queer Folklores” Just Femme & Dandy volume 06
Excerpt from a conversation with JJ Rowan about the patchwork powersuit, a.k.a. “the Gundam Suit”:
Gundam suit
This really crazy patchwork piece is honestly like my magnum opus from the past year. I don’t think I’ve ever created a piece that I’ve felt this way about. It was very much a heart project, and a friend started very affectionately calling it the Gundam Suit (like the anime), which feels oddly appropriate. This piece is a collage of relevant semiotics, deeply informed by my research and the needlework circle, all of which led to a fashion show that we did in October. The theme of the show was power suits. A power suit is an outfit that facilitates gender euphoria. So we were doing all of this skill sharing in the circle, people who had never sewn before learning to sew, I learned how to crochet, working for months and using what we learned to co-create these outfits that made us feel like our most empowered selves. And then we walked down the runway. I styled the Gundam Suit even more skimpishly than you see in the photos: I had just a jock strap that says babes across the band in front of a couple hundred strangers. And I just flaunted this wild, marionette design that is a patchwork of an NFL Steelers jersey, some basketball jerseys, bandanas, and a really gnarly, garish lace grandma tablecloth. It’s mirroring this jock persona that feels super gender euphoric, a high femme aesthetic that I used to have in my early twenties that was equally gender euphoric at the time, and has this reference to hanky code. It also nods to cowboy culture and this nostalgia for queer semiotic communication from the past.
On alchemy
I read this amazing occult zine, an edition called Solve et Coagula, which are the key principles of alchemy: to dissolve and to reassemble is one of these principles. And they were saying that all collage work is alchemy because you’re boiling things down from their original parts and you’re putting them back together into something new. Whether it’s shit or gold is to be left undecided. But the Gundam Suit, this marionette, this little pony boy confused tablecloth, whatever it is, is a form of gender alchemy for me. Collage…it’s kind of like being nonbinary. You’re piecing together these parts that you’re pulling from your environment and a modular approach allows you to position them in the way that actually feels autonomous and right, and then you can switch it around again later.
This interview featured other pieces, including the Baby Clown Suit and the Story Pants.